Back to work, finally!!! I've really enjoyed having the winter off, but getting up in the AM and toodling off to the farm is a real joy.
Things are tight at Sandhill this year, so I am dealing with their stuff on the side as a favour to Dick and am working full time for the neighbour, Hank, at Cloudburst.
Today marks eighty-one days without a cigarette. Should be sailing in the clear by now, but find myself having days where the urge to smoke just rolls on and on.
The not smoking, being on EI, not having the girls living here anymore and trying to adjust to being bankrupt have all led to a return of depression. Ah yes, my old friend!
I first encountered depression in 1999, when work was adding up to about ten hours a day, six days a week, when I was considering filing for bankruptcy for the first time, when Patty and I were separated and moving towards divorce and when she was diagnosed with cancer. A difficult time but six months on Paxil seemed to put things right.
In 2004, the job at the Union was going to hell, I had managed to alienate most of the staff and was awaiting the results of hearings held by the Union and the Public Review Board into charges laid against me by some members my staff. Depression came roaring back into my life and kicked me on my ass for a couple of months before I visited the quack and got some pharmaceutical relief. I had the sense to stay on the pills for a couple of years, but getting fired cost me my health and welfare plan and unemployed people cannot afford the luxury of anti-depressants...so, I weaned off them.
As it turned out, the days at the farm seemed to act as a tonic for whatever ailed me and I suffered no great consequence for coming off the pills.
Now, here I am again. It seems that the evidence of the past ten years is that my psyche is just fine unless confronted with layers of troubles. I suppose that is a lament that a good number of depressed people could hum.
I can't help but wonder where the dividing line is between the depression that I seem to carry as a defining feature of my personality and depression that is worthy of treatment.
It is not such a simple question.
I ordinarily am reserved and something of a loner. My entertainments are reading and TV. I immerse myself in things to do with the Church, but not especially on a social/group scale. I like to hike/walk some and enjoy getting out alone in the canoe. When gas money is there I enjoy nothing as much as getting in the car and driving two or five hundred miles...just for the pleasure of feeling the miles roll by and the scenery unfold. I'm well-read and fairly intelligent, but am insecure in the face of formal education in others and in any event seldom put what I know to good use, it seems. Over and under it all there drifts a light fog of inadequacy and of fear. Depression? Perhaps the matrix within which depression most readily coalesces.
Whatever, I've got a small prescription for a sleeping aid and if that doesn't cure the most troubling of my current symptoms, I guess I'll be back on the most recent brand of pill therapy.
Bugger!!!
